Carve December Numbers 1-3

Remember how I decided to be really crazy this month and blog everyday AND carve a new stamp everyday.  Three days Down!  Woohoo!  Yay Crazy Me!

Here are my first three stamps for #CarveDecember:

Julie Fei Fan Balzer shows how to create quarter turn stamps in her book Carve, Stamp, Play.  I thought about many different shapes and finally decided to use one of my go to images: flowers.  I really like this way of creating an image!

Day two was inspired by Lyric Kinard's Celtic Knot video on youtube.

I drew a number of Celtic Knots and decided I wanted one in a stamp, but I needed to simplify it and create it to make a linking repeat.  The image still had some stray bits so I cleaned the stamp up and . . .

. . .ended up with this final image.  I was really disappointed that I didn't get the lines to line up perfectly and I said so when I posted the images on Instagram and Facebook.  One of my friends asked why I wanted them to line up. This really caused me to step back and think a moment, and I realized it was because I was wanting perfection - mechanical perfection.  I felt as if I weren't "good enough" without that mechanical perfection.  This was a bit of an eye opener!  I am not a machine, I am a human and lines that don't match are OKAY!

The more I look at the stamped images the more I like them.

I'm doing my best to embrace my imperfection.

Day three is a little bit of a variation of Day 2.

As I was carving I realized that I should be carving holiday images to put on my Christmas envelopes so we will see what I manage to create on day 4!